REDLITEDJ

Monthly Archives: December 2013

When my day job starts wearing down on me, I have to remember all the good things that it provides. I had money to buy some killer Christmas presents for my people this year, I eat really good pretty much every day, I got to meet Tupac’s mom one time, and today I heard this Nina Simone song I’d never heard before.

Nina Simone – See-Line Woman

If you pay attention to newer, indier music than I do, you might know this version better.

Feist – Sea Lion Woman

If you don’t pay attention to any music after 1939, then this might be most familiar to you.

Christine & Katherine Shipp – Sea Lion Woman

And to bring this all full circle, 2 of my 3 bosses at my corporate day job that somehow introduced me to a cool Nina Simone song are named… Christine and Katherine.

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I know this is kinda old but I’m still amazed by this song; not a lot a lot of rappers can bring this much bounce to a beat with so few drums.

Rich Boy – Play Day

Since a lot of people that I know and love don’t know and love rap like I do, I find myself hypothesizing ways that people misunderstand rap (because that’s obviously the only explanation of them not loving it like I do, they just don’t get it) and listening to this song made me come up with one possible misconception that I hear hinted at by lot from people. I was talking to a friend the other day about rap and we both agreed that we’d never heard any other kind of music whose artists speak and sing with as much conviction as rappers do, and that conviction is extremely compelling to me no matter what the specific words are. I think one misconception is that people mistake this conviction for anger, and just hear a lot of harshness and negativity. There are unquestionably a great many angry, negative, harsh rap songs, but I think that many of them aren’t particularly but get construed that way by people who aren’t used to the kind of conviction that these artists speak with. To me, I hear the same conviction in a civil rights leader or Baptist preacher, and even though I’m not the primary target audience for any of those speakers (including the rappers probably) and I may not be in full agreement with what all of these people have to say all the time, I am still moved and inspired by their conviction when I’m in its presence, and I think if people gained the ability to discern anger from conviction in rap there would be a lot more appreciators of it.

I’m not sure why this video instructs you to be fucked up while watching, I can tell you with certainty that if you watch this entire video, start to finish, full screen, without doing anything else, you will feel fucked up by the end regardless of any substances you’ve consumed. Art like this is some of the most interesting to me, where a clean, concise interpretation is just not possible, and it’s hard to know the intentions of anyone involved. It has this brain-emptying effect that other art doesn’t have for me. Is the music supposed to be creepy or relaxing? Is this woman supposed to be sexy or unsettling? Did anyone conceive in advance that a chopped and screwed “moments in love” chant would be happening during a glitching porn video and what that might mean? When you have enough unanswerable questions happening at once, your brain just kind of shuts down and you just take in what’s happening on its own terms, and I think that’s what’s interesting about it to me.